Richard Misrach spent several years making large-scale negative prints, a body of work that acknowledges the end of the analog negative while examining the indexical character and color of the medium. Within that larger project, he turned to desert vegetation, mostly dead: tumbleweeds, scrub-brush, the dry growth that persists at the edges of the American West. iPhone Studies: Reverse Scrubs collects a set of these plants, photographed with a phone rather than a view camera. The images began as studies for the large works. Misrach came to value the small prints in their own right, and the book presents them as such.

The subject is unglamorous, which is part of the point. A scrub bush is not a monument. Seen through the reverse logic of the negative print, it becomes a dense graphic form, its branches reading almost as drawing. The phone camera’s compressed scale gives the pictures an intimacy that belongs to the files themselves rather than to a scale of reproduction. This is not a technical exercise in new media. It is a landscapist of long standing testing how a familiar subject can still be made strange, and using a common instrument to do it.

Nazraeli Press issued the book in 2013 as number 82 in its One Picture Book series: a hardcover of 16 pages with ten four-color plates. The series format matters. Each title is a compact object, and this one is limited to 500 numbered copies and includes an original signed photograph by Misrach. That pairing of a short, tightly edited sequence with a tipped-in print gives the volume a double life, as a reading copy and as a piece of the artist’s hand.

For collectors of Misrach, of Nazraeli’s series, or of photography that thinks seriously about landscape and the tools used to record it, the book holds a specific place. It documents a working method at a moment of technological transition and preserves a minor, unmonumental subject with the attention the photographer gives to deserts and oceans.